The narrator’s mother
The primary parent whose closeness becomes distorted by the period’s false psychological theories about homosexuality.
To maintain closeness and stability after the marriage breaks down.
The book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeShe raises the children amid marital collapse and seeks emotional security through family attachment. Psychoanalytic explanations wrongly make the narrator’s relationship with her part of a supposed cause of his homosexuality.
How the book draws them
- Carefully composedDomestic order partly conceals the strain of the family’s instability.
- AffectionateHer closeness gives the narrator comfort as well as material for others’ theories.
- DependentHer need for attachment complicates the narrator’s efforts to separate.
- MisinterpretedPeriod psychology turns an ordinary family bond into a false diagnosis.
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